Many congratulations to Penelope Glen on being elevated to High Sheriff of Oxfordshire.
However, Sam McGregor’s report on this (Oxford Mail, April 27) ends by giving the impression that the SOS Roads campaign of the early-to-mid 1990s, with which Robert and Penelope Glen were energetically involved in 1993-94, was the sole campaign group which contributed to the then Government’s decision, in March 1994, to withdraw both the proposed Barton and North Oxford (Tin Hat) bypasses from the Ministry of Transport’s Roads for Prosperity programme.
SOS Roads certainly did, over the last year of a two-year plus campaign, play a significant role.
However, this was only as one part of a complex jigsaw of local community groups, notably on Barton and Cutteslowe ( and beyond) and along the Bayswater Road, of Friends of the Earth, the Oxford Preservation Trust, the Oxford Civic Trust, and many individuals, most of whom had been fighting long and hard, from well before SOS Roads was formed, against what were in fact planned as links in a six-lane Felixstowe to Fishguard east-west route.
Penelope Glen would certainly not claim that SOS Roads alone was the prime mover against the fake bypasses, for the campaign was “a fusion of horizons”, and deserves a paragraph or three in Oxford and Oxfordshire’s environmental and cultural history, as no doubt will Mrs Glen.
Bruce Ross-Smith, Bowness Avenue, Headington
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